Flow Specification (Flowspec) is a new type of Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) for the BGP routing protocol. It was originally developed to help mitigate DDoS attacks but its use has expanded to numerous other applications.

In marketing terms, “appending” – also known as "e-appending" or "e-pending" – is the practice of taking demographic information known (or assumed) to be related to a particular customer and matching it with other data. It is the position of M3AAWG that this is an abusive messaging practice. The January 2019 Version 1.0.1 is updated to include the European Union's GDPR and CASL.

Phishing continues to be a significant problem for hosting companies, mailbox providers, brand owners and, of course, for every internet user. This document iinforms all of these groups on the best current practices for reporting phishing URLs.

Although M3AAWG recommends blocking outbound port 25 traffic as the best option for controlling the flow of unwanted email traffic from an ISP’s customer space, such blocks may not always be possible, either for the short or long term. This document offers some alternatives for these ISPs by describing methods they can use to share their dynamic space information with others and allow remote sites to reject inbound mail traffic from dynamic address space.

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Public Policy Comments

A joint survey conducted by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) and M3AAWG looks at how cyber investigators use WHOIS data and how the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has affected their anti-abuse efforts. The letter from M3AAWG and survey are also available on the ICANN site at https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/upton-to-marby-et-a...

M3AAWG submitted these short comments to ICANN stating that an expert group from the Anti-Abuse community should be created to facilitate the certification of qualified applicants from the security field.

[Author’s note: As I write this in October, the second massive denial of service attack in two weeks threatening to take down significant sections of the internet has just ended. Could full implementation of Operation Safety-Net have prevented this?

Over the past few years, the Pervasive Monitoring SIG within M3AAWG has worked to educate members and the community at large about better practices for message encryption and data privacy. Messaging abuse, such as Man-in-the-Middle attacks, continues to threaten end-users and make confidential personal and business data more accessible to cybercriminals. After the revelations made by various whistleblowers around the world, we now know that we’re being watched at an ever-increasing rate, and even if we believe we’re innocent, our privacy could be violated without just cause. read more

Ongoing disclosures about the pervasive monitoring of email, voice and other network traffic remain an industry concern and major companies in the online ecosystem have been publicly identified as specific targets for non-consensual eavesdropping activity. As a result, both the general public and various technical communities have a heightened interest in implementing measures that could protect operational security and customer privacy.

Over the past year or so, messaging security and encryption has been increasingly in the spotlight. We now send and receive more data over the Internet than ever before, yet until recently, email messages have been typically transmitted in clear text. This lack of encryption allows any interested party with just a little know-how and some basic equipment to potentially intercept the content therein: they can read personal information, bills, social media notices, birthday invitations, promotional material and even access pictures of loved ones or other sensitive attachments.